Home; About; Services Menu Toggle. She even lacerated August Bebel, the ‘centrist’ party leader who increasingly “could only hear with his right ear”. In addition it had over 110 deputies in the Reichstag and 220 deputies in the various Landtags (state parliaments) as well as almost 3,000 elected municipal councillors. They felt it was their duty to stay with the workers. They were both born in the same year, 1871, and died on the same day, their names necessarily linked in history. The opposite was the case in 1923 in Germany. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1919) W E HAVE suffered two heavy losses at once which merge into one enormous bereavement. Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht - commemorating 100 years. On New Year’s Day 1919 Luxemburg declared: “Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all. 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. The real weakness of Luxemburg and Jogiches was not that they refused to split but that in the entire preceding historical period they were not organised as a clearly-defined trend in social democracy preparing for the revolutionary outbursts upon which the whole of Rosa Luxemburg’s work for more than 10 years was based. 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. 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. The organisational conclusion from this was of a tactical rather than a principled character. The ‘spontaneous’ character of the German revolution was evident in November 1918. One might ask why the SPD leadership was so anxious to see Rosa’s voice silenced, especially since before World War I she “lacked a unique voice and public faction in the party.”(2) It may have been in part because of her close association with Karl Liebknecht, the son of SPD co-founder Wilhelm Liebknecht and the first SPD parliamentarian to vote against German support of the war. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered by paramilitaries, acting on the orders of the German Social-Democratic government. März 1871 in der kleinen polnischen Stadt Zamos´c geboren. 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. Side-by-side: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the SPD Congress in Leipzig in 1909. August 1871 in Leipzig; † 15. In her writings, Luxemburg leveled pointed critiques not only at moderate socialism but also at the new Leninist revolutionary model in Bolshevik Russia. A Socialist and a vocal critic of the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) war policies, co-founder of the anti-war Spartacus League in 1916 and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg supported the German Revolution of 1918. 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. August 1871 in Leipzig; † 15. 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. 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. Rosa Luxemburg was an important figure in all the congresses of the Second International and generally carried the votes of the Polish Social Democratic party in exile. Von Anfang an war Proletariat der revolutionären Bewegung in Russland voraus. “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. Such was the role of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian revolution. Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht (* 13. 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 … 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. Those who try and picture her as a critic of the Bolsheviks and the Russian revolution are entirely false. But such an approach – justified at one historical period – can be a monumental error at another, when conditions change and particularly when abrupt revolutionary breaks are posed. Friedrich Ebert’s majority Social Democratic government crushed the revolt and the Spartacus League by sending in the Freikorps, a government-sponsored paramilitary group consisting mostly of now out-of-work World War I veterans. The Bolsheviks enjoyed mass support and under those conditions calling a general strike would have weakened them and not the capitalist enemy. 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. After this uprising was suppressed he was arrested by the Scheidemann government and on January 15, 1919 was assassinated together with Rosa Luxemburg by a gang of German officers, covertly abetted by the Scheidemannists «Karl Liebknecht called upon the workers and soldiers of Germany to turn their guns against their own government. 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. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. That lasted right up to the German social democrats’ infamous vote in favour of war credits on 4 August 1914. But it is only an irresponsible daydream to want to liberate the whole mass of the working class from the very weighty and dangerous yoke of the bourgeoisie by a simple ‘walk out’.”. This was a summing up of the first Russian revolution from which Luxemburg drew both political and organisational conclusions. This does not have to take the form necessarily, on all occasions, of a separate ‘party’. 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. Yet still in her most erroneous work she wrote of the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks: “Everything that a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness, and consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure… Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism”. But this became all the greater for the working class with the murder 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. Indeed, many revolutions have been made in the teeth of opposition and even sabotage of the leaders of the workers’ own organisations. In fact, in his famous work, ‘Two Tactics of Russian Social Democracy” of 1905, Lenin wrote: “When and where did I ever call the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky ‘opportunism’? This week marks the anniversary of the Jan. 15, 1919, murders of German communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Among them were Stalin and Stalinists in the past. STOP the ‘Going to Work Tax’ on NHS workers! If the opportunity is lost, it may not recur for a long time, and the working class can suffer a defeat. Our party and campaigns rely entirely on donations from ordinary people. 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. And in anticipation of when the army of the German proletariat will close its ranks under the banner of Karl and Rosa, each of us will consider it his duty to draw to the attention of our Red Army, who Liebknecht and Luxemburg were, what they died for and why their memory must remain sacred for every Red soldier and for every worker and peasant. Rosa Luxemburg was released from prison on 9 November 1918 and immediately did all she could to support the No-vember Revolution. 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. IT IS ONLY appropriate, of course, that Klaus Gietinger’s The Murder of But the social-democratic leaders like Gustav Noske and Philipp Scheidemann conspired with the capitalists and the reactionary scum in the Freikorps (predecessors of the fascists) to take their revenge. Januar 1919 in Berlin Freikorpssoldaten der Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division die untergetauchten Führer des Spartakusbunds, Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht.Sie verschleppten die beiden Köpfe der revolutionären Bewegung in das Hauptquartier des Freikorps im Hotel Eden und verhörten sie dort … 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. Main Menu. Nevertheless, they took with them 120,000 members and a number of newspapers. Although the new KPD participated in the Weimar National Assembly that founded the post-war Weimar Republic, the KPD decided to boycott the scheduled elections. 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. [3] The events of the German revolution were dealt with in Socialism Today (Issue 123, November 2008) and The Socialist (Issue 555, 4 November 2008). This itself is an indication of the speed of events that developed in Germany at this stage. 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. 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. They have invariably been indistinguishable politically from the reformist or centrist leaders. Karl Liebknecht was in 1914 the only Social Democrat to reject the war, or spending one mark for it. 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. While the Spd did Beat down the Spartakus Revolution lead by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, they did Not deploy the Freikorps. Luxemburg was shot and her body was thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin, only to be found and identified months later, and Liebknecht was shot in the Tiergarten park. People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. 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. Emotion Coaching; Free Resources; Blog; Contact Rosa Luxemburg wurde am 5. 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. Verhaftung am 15. Margarethe von Trotha’s outstanding 1986 film ‘Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg’ is available online with English subtitles. 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. But if the German revolution had triumphed then history would not, in all probability, have known these figures or the horrors of fascism. Lenin systematically trained and organised the best workers in Russia in implacable opposition to capitalism and its shadows in the labour movement. The young German Communist Party was by a treacherous murder of their best leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg – deprived of their leadership. This was reinforced by the growth in the weight of the SPD within German society. She became involved in underground activities while still in high school.Like many of her radical contemporaries from the Russian Empire who were … Become a People's World sustainer today. This would prove fatal. By uniting, however temporarily, with liberal and progressive forces against the main enemy, fascism could be defeated, as they proved in World War II. 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. Januar 1919 in Berlin) war ein prominenter Marxist und Antimilitarist zu Zeiten des Deutschen Kaiserreiches. Die … 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 growing opposition to the war, however, widened the circle of support and contacts for Luxemburg and the Sparticist group. She wrote that it was necessary “to act on progressives and possibly even liberals, than to act with them”. In 1915, they broke from the SPD and co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League (Spartakusbund). Together with other Spartacists Liebknecht campaigned openly for revolution, forming the German Communist Party at the end of December 1918. It was this aspect that Lenin subjected to criticism in his comments on Rosa Luxemburg’s’ Junius’ pamphlet, published in 1915. 90th anniversary of murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. 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. Disgrace of over 4 million children in poverty. In some instances, it is an inappropriate weapon; at the time of General Lavr Kornilov’s march against Petrograd in August 1917, neither the Bolsheviks nor the soviets (workers’ councils) thought of declaring a general strike. “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all,” she wrote. Januar 1919 ermordeten Freikorps-Soldaten die Anführer des Spartakus-Aufstandes. Karl Liebknecht is correctly bracketed with Luxemburg as the heroic mass figure who stood out against the German war machine and symbolised to the troops in the blood-soaked trenches, not just Germans but French and others, as an indefatigable, working-class, internationalist opponent of the First World War. The answer was Rosa Luxemburg, but she wasn’t given a chance to do so. Rosa Luxemburg confronted an entirely different situation, as a minority, and somewhat isolated in a ‘legal’ mass party with all the attributes described above. Freikorps troops captured Luxemburg and Liebknecht without an arrest warrant and summarily executed them. Moreover, Luxemburg was amongst the very few who recognised the ideological atrophy of German social democracy prior to the First World 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. Rosa Luxemburg was the youngest of five children of a lower middle-class Jewish family in Russian-ruled Poland. 'Red Rosa' Luxemburg and the making of a revolutionary icon Revolutionary socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered 100 years ago in Berlin. 3, 18 January 1941, p.3. With the collapse of the German government in October 1918 Liebknecht was granted political amnesty by Max von Baden. 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. In the convulsive events of 1923 in particular, Rosa Luxemburg with her keen instinct for the mass movement and ability to change with circumstances, would probably not have made the mistake made by Heinrich Brandler and the leadership of the KPD, when they let slip what was one of the most favourable opportunities in history to make a working-class revolution and change the course of world history. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924. 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. This necessarily involved clearly organising a grouping, ‘faction’ – one that was organised as well as based on firm political principles. Here it is: http://archive.org/details/RosaLuxemburg. This meant that the prospects for socialism, specifically the socialist revolution, were relegated to the mists of time in their consciousness. This was seen in the revolutionary events of 1936 in Spain. 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. But a vital element of Marxism, in developing political influence through a firm organisation or a party, was not sufficiently developed by Rosa Luxemburg or her supporters. A period of dual power was initiated and the capitalists were compelled to give important concessions to the masses such as the eight-hour day. 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. Karl Liebknecht studied law and political economy in Leipzig. This would have removed the two leaders whose ideas and political guidance led to the success of the October revolution. The political power behind the throne to better-known generals was Major Kurt von Schleicher, who became German Chancellor in 1932 and a gateman for Hitler and the Nazis. 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. 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. He earned his doctorate at the University of Würzburg in 1897 and moved to Berlin in 1899, where he opened a lawyer's office with his brother, Theodor Liebknecht. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps(paramilitary units formed of World War I veteran… 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. Trotsky also, in his famous book, ‘Results and Prospects’ (1906), in which the Theory of the Permanent Revolution was first outlined, did have a perception of what could take place: “The European Socialist Parties, particularly the largest of them, the German Social-Democratic Party, have developed their conservatism in proportion as the great masses have embraced socialism and the more these masses have become organized and disciplined… Social Democracy as an organization embodying the political experience of the proletariat may at a certain moment become a direct obstacle to open conflict between the workers and bourgeois reaction.” In his autobiography, ‘My Life’, Trotsky subsequently wrote: “I did not expect the official leaders of the International, in case of war, to prove themselves capable of serious revolutionary initiative. Bertolt Brecht’s poetic memorial Epitaph upon her death was included in Kurt Weill’s 1928 composition The Berlin Requiem: “Red Rosa now has vanished too…. Given the isolation of Berlin from the rest of the country at that stage, a setback or a defeat was inevitable. Their Spartacus League published The Red Flag (Die Rote Fahne) newspaper, demanding amnesty for all political prisoners and the abolition of capital punishment. On the contrary, the railway workers continued to work so that could transport the opponents of Kornilov and derail his forces. Rosa Luxemburg and the Revolutionary Antiwar Mass Strikes in Germany during World War I Since 1906 Rosa Luxemburg was the outstanding protagonist of the revolutionary mass strike idea in Germany. Change ). 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. 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. In emphasising the independent movement and will of the working class against “the line and march of officialdom”, she was undoubtedly correct in a broad historical sense. He is best known for his opposition to the war in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919. They were both born in the same year, 1871, and died on the same day, their names necessarily linked in history. Socialists and communists commemorate them yearly on the second Sunday of January at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin, where they are buried. Although she was a naturalised German citizen, Luxemburg was considered an ‘outsider’, particularly when she came into conflict with the SPD leadership. 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. At the time of the October revolution, in 1917, there was again no talk of a general strike. From Socialist Appeal, Vol. This led in 1975 to the expropriation of the majority of industry. But also in the words of Lenin, “In spite of her mistakes she was – and remains for us – an eagle”. In that case, our Party will be the extreme opposition within the old International – until a base is formed in different countries for an international working men’s association that stands on the basis of revolutionary Marxism.” When the floodgates of revolution were thrown open in February 1917 in Russia, and the masses poured onto the political arena, even the Bolsheviks – despite their previous history – had about 1% support in the soviets, and 4% by April 1917. However, as Pierre Broué points out: “She was never able to establish within the SPD either a permanent platform based on the support of a newspaper or a journal or a stable audience wider than a handful of friends and supporters around her.”. There were at least 15,000 full-time officials under the sway of the SPD in the trade unions. Rosa Luxemburg confronted a different objective situation to that facing the Bolsheviks in Russia. Luxemburg was a real internationalist; a participant in the revolutionary movement in three countries. Communists will lead a march to the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in the east of the city and … 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. In the 1926 general strike in Britain, the issue of power was posed, where ‘dual power’ existed for nine days. ( Log Out / 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. At the same time, I could not even admit the idea that the Social Democracy would simply cower on its belly before a nationalist militarism.”. If we are to successfully change society then we need to study previous socialist movements to understand the lessons for today. But an all-sided analysis of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas, taking into account the historical situation in which her ideas matured and developed, demonstrates that the claims of both of these camps are false. Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were turn-of-the-century anti-imperialist, anti-war revolutionaries. It was written in opposition to the main theoretician of ‘revisionism’, Eduard Bernstein. A political ‘split’ was undoubtedly required, both from the right and ‘left’ SPD.
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